Backplanes are often employed in rack mounted systems to provide high speed interconnections between the electronic devices mounted in the racks. The backplanes are typically constructed of multi-layer circuit boards with conductive traces selectively routed to provide the high-speed interconnections. Currently, bus-based or fabric based backplanes are commonly used to provide the interconnections.
In bus-based backplanes, large sets of parallel signals are used to interconnect the electronic devices. Because the total throughput must be shared among all of the electronic devices along the bus-based backplane, there are practical limits on the maximum system throughput, which often limits reliability. In fabric based backplanes, a central high-speed fabric or hub is used to switch traffic between all of the electronic devices. The costs, however, associated with the fabric based backplanes tend to be relatively high because of the additional full central fabric required to implement this type of backplane.